SF Book Discussion

The Apocalypse is upon us!  Well, at least in a fictional fashion.  Our newly formed Science Fiction Book Discussion group met for the first time on Groundhog Day (Feb. 2nd.)  We discussed William Forstchen's book One Second After.  My impression after the discussion was that generally the group liked the book and thought that Forstchen's portrayal of the breakdown of civil society was compelling and realistic.  As I read, I was most surprised by the author's take on the weaknesses in modern food supply for large populations and the potential - the certainty, really - that many, many people who are alive because of the marvel of modern medicine would very rapidly die off in the event of a major disruption in pharmaceutical production.

Our next book is Walter Miller's classic post-apocalyptic book, A Canticle for Leibowitz.  We'll discuss it April 5th at 7pm here in the Hutchinson Public Library.  Where One Second After warned of the dangers of EMPs to modern electronics (and civilization), A Canticle for Leibowitz warns us about the dangers of a more traditional nuclear holocaust.  The following is a description of the book I found at Amazon:

Walter M. Miller's acclaimed SF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz opens with the accidental excavation of a holy artifact: a creased, brittle memo scrawled by the hand of the blessed Saint Leibowitz, that reads: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma." To the Brothers of Saint Leibowitz, this sacred shopping list penned by an obscure, 20th-century engineer is a symbol of hope from the distant past, from before the Simplification, the fiery atomic holocaust that plunged the earth into darkness and ignorance. As 1984 cautioned against Stalinism, so 1959's A Canticle for Leibowitz warns of the threat and implications of nuclear annihilation. Following a cloister of monks in their Utah abbey over some six or seven hundred years, the funny but bleak Canticle tackles the sociological and religious implications of the cyclical rise and fall of civilization, questioning whether humanity can hope for more than repeating its own history. Divided into three sections--Fiat Homo (Let There Be Man), Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy Will Be Done)--Canticle is steeped in Catholicism and Latin, exploring the fascinating, seemingly capricious process of how and why a person is canonized. --Paul Hughes

Our third title, for discussion June 7th will be Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse.  This is a themed collection of short stories by authors such as George R.R. Martin, Stephen King, and Octavia Butler.  Here is a brief review from Booklist:

With this well-chosen set of postapocalyptic stories, editor Adams provides a bit of everything that is best about the trope, from bleak, empty worlds to beacons of hope in an otherwise awful situation. Only Jerry Oltion’s “Judgment Passed,” about what happens when a space expedition returns to an Earth to which Jesus has returned, and the rapture has come without them, is original to the collection. Stephen King’s bleak “The End of the Whole Mess” opens, John Langan’s much more recent “Episode Seven: Last Stand against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers” closes, and they are wildly different. Highlights in between include Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” in which civilization has ended because a disease has made most people unable to talk, read, or do any number of once-taken-for-granted things, and Elizabeth Bear’s “And the Deep Blue Sea,” a brilliant take on a world laid waste and a devil’s bargain that treads in Roger Zelazny’s manic footsteps. A well-chosen selection of well-crafted stories, offering something to please nearly every postapocalyptic palate. --Regina Schroeder

While we want our inaugural year - 2012 - of book selections to be based around the theme of the "end of the world", we hope to continue our discussion group into the future (barring and ACTUAL end to the world) and branch out into the many other areas of speculative and fantasy fiction.  If you are interested in joining us, please reply here in the comments with your email address and I will get you signed up!

This is how we CAN have nice things

For all of the "smaller government" and "taxes are too high" talk that we all hear, day-in and day-out, there are actually good reasons for having robust, smart government:  Government that coordinates; government that practices efficiency (yes I went there); government that gets the job done.

Why do I think this?  Because there are lots of things in our daily lives that we take for granted AND that no one else is willing to do.  What things immediately come to mind that everyone wants and that government provides?  Familiar things like fire service, policing, trash removal, running water / sewer, and road repair.  Then there are more esoteric services (if you can call them that) that have made and continue to make modern civilization possible.  Things like a public education system, support for sciences, art, and higher education; and even libraries.  What's an efficient, coordinated way state government can help each and every public library in Kansas?

This is a quote from the State Librarian's budget presentation yesterday:

Last year the State Library asked one of the database vendors – Gale CENGAGE – to compile the cost for individual subscriptions, in short, what would be the cost if every library subscribed on its own.  That figure was $24,767,699 – nearly $25 M.  The statewide contract with this vendor is $632,000 so cost avoidance is over $24M.

The numbers are so wildly disparate, they almost don't make sense, do they?  The State - the STATE GOVERNMENT - can save taxpayers $24,000,000 by spending a mere 3% of that sum instead of pretending to be fiscally responsible by eliminating programs they perceive as being frivolous or unneeded.


Will all libraries in the state subscribe to Gale CENGAGE online resources with individual contracts?  Of course not.  Many simply will never be able to afford such tools.  But it wouldn't take many individual contracts to start bumping up against that $632k.  The State of Kansas can provide every library and by extension, every citizen these tools for a bargain price.  Funding for the State Library has been cut by an appalling 30.6% over the past 5 years.  Funding for the statewide databases will disappear entirely in the next year if a decision is not made.  I hope our legislators understand the tremendous economy of scale that can be achieved in this instance and decide to do the right thing by funding the State Library at a proper level.

The Hunt for New Ideas, part 2: Revenge of the New Idea

Library stacks.  Library shelving.  You can picture in your mind exactly what I'm talking about without me actually going out there and finding an image, right?  It hardly seems like something that would be subject to a "new idea" does it?  The humble book shelf and book stack has remained largely unchanged in public libraries for 150-odd years.  Here's what the stacks look like in the Hutchinson Public Library:

Storage, pure and simple.  What's hard to see here is how they are constructed.  Each section has a rectangular frame in the middle from which the shelves hang.  Like this:

This is not a bad way to do it.  It holds the shelves very securely, allows for long rows to be linked together, and is very sturdy.  However, one is limited in configuration because most of these systems don't work very well with different height frames hooked together - basically you can put together long lines of, for example, 7' high shelf stacks.

So along comes a company called Paragon with a new way of looking at library shelving.  At least it's new to me.  And I've been looking.  The shelving product is called Intuitive-IC and they allow a library to do one thing differently - mix up and combine shelf heights, work surfaces, and seating within the row of shelving.  Here's a picture:

If you look closely, you can see that the cantilever supports that hold up the shelves go from the front and back edges toward the middle of the shelves.  This allows all different heights of shelves to be put together in a row.  They have a short little YouTube video that shows some of the possibilities.

I think this might be a good choice for our art collection on the second floor since we need to replace the shelving there.  We need to be able to stack higher, but want the option of some low tops on which to set heavy books.  It is a collection that lends itself to browsing and sometimes it is easier to look through a few right there in the stacks before deciding which ones to check out.

As I go through the stack of papers and brochures I picked up at ALA Midwinter, I continue to find more and more good ideas and nifty new ways of looking at the same old library things!

The Hunt for New Ideas

Mediasurfer iPad self-check

Laptop self-check

I went to the ALA Midwinter meeting Exhibits Hall in Dallas over the weekend with a long wish list.  Big meetings such as that are great for networking and learning new things, but they are also GREAT for finding out about how to meet patron needs through new products and services.

Are there really any new ideas out there?  Has everything already been done?  Maybe.  But some people are taking ideas and running with them in pretty cool ways.  Take the idea of checking out laptops or other devices to library patrons.  HPL has checked out laptops for 3 years now.  They are used in-house only and circulate from the adult circulation desk.  But what if you could automate this process?  Sort of a Redbox for electronics?  Two companies have done just that - Mediasurfer and LaptopsAnytime.  The Mediasurfer kiosk dispenses tablets (iPads, specifically) only, while the LaptopsAnytime device can be customized to dispense laptops and netbooks.

Imagine being able to just walk up to the machine, scan your card, and go sit down and start computing with a clean, fully-charged device.  When it comes to return time, no waiting in lines, no fuss, just put the device back in whichever empty slot is available.

I'm looking for new ways to serve our patrons as we work to re-imagine the library technology center.  Another HUGE time drain we struggle with here at HPL is assigning public computers and dealing with printing.  I spent a lot of time looking for solutions there and I think I found at least one good option.  Something that will allow us to provide wireless printing, print control and login/registration on public computers.  This will help us to free up key staff members who can then share their expertise and help patrons solve their technology problems.

It is somewhat hard to describe, but the kernel at the core of our re-imagining is not to provide new technology, but to help people interface with the library and its resources.  As I sift through the information I gathered at ALA, I will share more and continue to write about where we're headed with technology and which new/old ideas we are going to implement.

The Revolution is Here!

A colleague who happens also to be a board member here at HPL forwarded this article from the journal American Libraries.  It is definitely worth a read.  Here's why I think it is relevant to us here in lil' ol' Hutchinson:  We are looking inward and examining our mission and role in the community right now.  The gist of the article is that essentially, the revolution in libraries is not just one of adapting to new digital formats, it is one of challenges to the very core of our (the public library world) identity and mission.

According to the article, major shifts in areas libraries once controlled are taking place.  Here are the major challenges:  Shifts in collection development - publishers are wresting this away from librarians by refusing to offer econtent to libraries; Access - license agreements dictate length of checkout and even number of checkouts before an item must be "discarded"; Preservation - this is a scary one because no one really "collects" content that isn't in an analog (paper) format because no one "owns" the items in a digital world; and finally, Privacy - librarians have long been the guardians of patron's privacy and in the digital realm that is simply no longer the case.

So what is a poor, meek librarian to do?  First off, fight to shed the poor, meek stereotype.  I think ALA would do well to hire a Madison Avenue ad agency and change our collective image.  Afterall, image is everything and perception is reality.

The article linked earlier finishes up though with a great suggestion:  That libraries should embrace the core of a report by Roger Levien written in June 2011 for ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy Confronting the Future: Strategic Visions for 21^st-Century Public Libraries (PDF file).  The core idea is this:

 

The Six Ps

• People. Librarians provide unbiased services and advice based on expertise and professional norms.
• Place. Libraries are physical spaces conducive to individual or group contemplative work.
• Price. Library services are generally provided at no charge to the user, and access is available regardless of individual ability to pay.
• Principles. Library services are provided under the rubric of intellectual freedom, privacy, and trust.
• Pride. An excellent library is an indicator of a community with quality public services and high quality of life.
• Package. Libraries provide successful integration of information services across disparate functions.

This seems like a great starting place for a library's statement of core principles, don't you think?  I still believe that libraries can save for everyone our embattled national ideals.  Libraries are unique places offering some of the most cost-effective services a government can fund (hint, hint Kansas Legislature) and librarians, at least here in Hutchinson Kansas, are willing to adapt.  But we can't do it alone, we need the support of our elected leaders and the input of our most precious resource - the communities we serve.  So how about it Hutchinson - what service would be the most helpful / cool / cost-effective for you?

2012 - Starting off with an end?

In more ways than one, unfortunately.  The less happy "end" is that our coffee bar is once again without a proprietor.  Rita's Roast has been forced to close after a series of unfortunate events beset our contractor.  We are going to spend some time assessing the value of offering the service to our patrons versus the difficulty in keeping such an operation going.  What are your thoughts?

Coffee, tea, or...?

The positive "end" is that the library has launched an entire series of programs aimed at one thing - preparing for the unexpected.  The "Are you prepared...?" series has started off with great success.  Coming up are a series of weather and driving preparedness lunch-and-learn sessions.

Also, our newest book discussion group will meet for the first time at 7pm on February 2nd.  Our first book is One Second After, by William Forstchen.  I am really a novice at book discussion groups, but I am excited to be able to help get this one off the ground!  Apocalyptic fiction is our focus (at least for the first two books) and we are planning on reading a total of 6 books this year.  Will they be the final 6 books I read?  I guess we'll have to wait and see if the world really does end at the end of this meso-american long count calendar cycle!

I am looking forward to more positives than negatives in 2012.  That may sound like I am setting my sights low, but I'm not, really.  The challenges confronting libraries are many and dauntingly complicated in some cases.  However, Hutchinson is lucky to have a public library staffed with smart, savvy people and I have every confidence that they will rise to the challenges and find innovative, useful ways to overcome them.  Come in and try our programs, ask about our services, and most importantly:  Give us feedback about what you would like from your public library!

Are you prepared... for the END?

The craziness of the holiday season has begun to ebb and the reality of the new year has set in.  Our last year if you believe some folks!  While I'm more inclined to believe these folks, it hasn't stopped us here at HPL from creating a bunch of fun programs to get you prepared.  You know, "just in case".  We've already had one successful program, "Are you prepared...for Winter Driving?" put on in collaboration with the nice folks at Midwest Superstore's service department.  Coming up are 2 lunch and learn programs:

• January 18 - Home fire safety (how to safely heat your home) presenter L.D. Peevyhouse
• January 25 - Winter storm preparedness with presenter Bill Guy
• February 1 - Gary Warner - Kansas Highway Patrol safe winter driving

All the lunch and learn programs will be from 12:10 to 12:50 to give you time to get back and forth from work!  We will have many more programs to follow on a variety of topics.  Topics we are working on include:  Getting your affairs in order (estate planning); Safe summer travel; and Gardening and preserving.

You can find more details about these programs on the library's calender here.

Used by permission of artist Dan Piraro